Why National Problems Are Best Solved Locally – Deseret News

Nearly 250 years ago, America kicked its king to the curb when this new nation began a great experiment with the most ambitious idea ever conceived on planet Earth: a diverse people could have self-government.

But to live and breathe freely, our founders knew that we would have to maintain uneasy relationships between “factions.” This is how you solve problems without the King of Fancy Pants telling you what to do.

Fast forward a couple of centuries, and the mutual tolerance necessary for self-government is rare. From the groups we join to what we like on Facebook, we structure our lives to surround ourselves with like-minded people.

Because we spend too much time in homogeneous digital silos and not enough exposure to people we disagree with in the real world, we lose the ability to see each other clearly or learn anything new, let alone solve the complex problems we face. This problem is big and dangerous.

Americans can be forgiven for looking to our nation’s elected leaders to fix this fracture in the body politic. But in America it was never about the king; it was always about the people.

As much as we might wish otherwise, the healing of our civic divide must begin in the hometowns in which we live and in the spaces between us as we go about our daily lives. I know this because we have seen it in our community.

Founded in Tallahassee, Florida after differences led leaders to want a better way, Village square The company’s mission is to build civil trust between people who are not alike and do not think alike. In this local revival of the quintessential American town hall, we’ve had hundreds of conversations with tens of thousands of people.

We talk in bars, we talk in churches, we talk across a hundred solid tables in the middle of a street downtown. In all of these conversations, we discovered something truly remarkable: it’s hard to hate people in close-up.

However, divisive politicians and media figures would have us believe that alienation from our fellow Americans is inevitable because the differences are so great that there is simply no reason to communicate directly. We can only hope to defeat “them.” These conflict profiteers know that when we fight each other to the death, their market share increases.

This crisis is caused not so much by the fact that we disagree (our country was created for disagreement) but by the very distance that we have allowed to grow between us. We don’t know each other, so we don’t trust each other. And if we don’t trust each other, we will believe the worst in each other.

Closing that distance changes everything, and no president can do it for us.

A few years ago, inspired by The Village Square, my husband struck up a friendship with an acquaintance over their political differences.

When you decide to get closer, sometimes you find yourself agreeing. But more often than not, you are amazed at the obvious good intentions of people, even when the difference of opinion is enormous. The most important thing is that when we are close to each other, people have a superpower – we respond with kindness to kindness.

My husband and his friend still disagree, but politics now ranks 20th in their friendship.

Imagine if most of us felt this way about at least one political “enemy”? This is something that is under our control. It may seem daunting at first, but we invite people across the country to “dare” and reach out to their political opposite, whether it’s a school friend or a neighbor down the street. We found real joy in these new friendships.

Existing communities can encourage similarly unlikely relationships at scale: churches can gather with politically diverse communities around mission work, and left-leaning groups can collaborate with right-leaning groups. You can even open a village square in your hometown. In a digital age that divides us, we can be intentional about coming together from time to time. It will be tragic if we don’t at least try.

If we citizens do our part, then the next time politicians hold their finger in the wind – as they tend to do – they will see that the wind has changed and that we no longer want to live our lives in the toxic binary system that has been created. according to our distance.

Together, we can write the next chapter of our stories in our hometowns, with our family, friends and neighbors. In a country created by people and for people, it should not be any different.

Liz Joyner is the founder and president of The Village Square.

This story appears in the November 2024 issue of the magazine. Deseret Magazine. Find out more about how to subscribe.